


world in my eyes

by hikarusulu



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, mentions of Tarsus IV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 07:16:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13699569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikarusulu/pseuds/hikarusulu
Summary: Spock reads Plato and Jim becomes thirteen again.





	world in my eyes

**Author's Note:**

> hello!!  
> this is my fist fic in like 8 years lmao and also my first fic in english so i really don't know how u guys will perceive it, but I'm hoping it's not that bad  
> anyway I'd like to thank my dear jim jam and sara for beta'ing it for me ;o;  
> FEEL free to give me advice!! comments are more than appreciated  
> I'm on twitter (@plomeek) if u wanna talk aboutt spirk or whatever  
> HOPE U LIKE IT :-)  
> ps: I've taken the freedom to change a few things about tarsus so it's not entirely canon compliant

The beer bottle condensation had been dripping steadily for three months, enough to form a small puddle on the wooden floor. Winona’s voice echoed through his head, a brief lecture on how this kind of sloppiness could leave stains.

It wasn’t his problem. The bottle, hanging so low it was just a few centimeters close to the floor, belonged to the man holding it — Frank —  who also hadn’t moved for three months, Jim thought. He spread a putrid aura which reminded him of the bodies he had seen at the colony. The only sign of his uncle being alive was his occasional long, drawn-out snore.

Jim felt dirty looking at that. He wanted to scrub himself.

Jim threw a cloth on the puddle and stepped outside, the clear sky greeting him indifferently.

Nothing much had changed while he was out, and he wondered if Iowa existed whatsoever when he wasn’t there to witness it. The thought sent him a wave of panic, causing the landscape to shift in his eyes. The endless sea of corn now appeared to be too bright and the summer air, so hot and stuffy it started to suffocate him. He closed his eyes and held his backpack straps a little too tight.

Riverside was atemporal. It felt like Tarsus happened in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second — an instant dislodged from space-time. Had his absence even been noticed? He hoped not. He didn’t want to be questioned.

 _Tough luck, you stupid fuck,_ Jim thought to himself, as he kicked a few pebbles off the road.

_It’s been three fucking months._

 

_+++_

 

A bird landed onto the window next to him, painted orange with the sunrise. It peered uninterested inside into the grey room and laid its eyes on Jim.

“...Plato, not all of you may know, is one of the most important figures of Earth history...”

He wondered if the bird could feel the change in the atmosphere — Jim himself felt it when he arrived to class. More charged than what Frank’s aura was emanating back home, it spread in the air like toxic gas, but he had discovered quickly you could avoid it by not meeting anyone’s eye. They gave away what was going on inside everyone's mind, nowadays nothing but dull and despairing emptiness.

“...he, as philosopher, believed in the immortality of the soul…”

Apparently something had happened while he was having his own crisis on Tarsus. People knew something he didn’t —  something dreadful and inevitable. His hands started to sweat as a foreign uneasiness invaded him. 

He deflected his eyes to watch the bird, which turned around and sang its song, seemingly unaware of the heaviness in the room. Unsurprisingly, nobody but him seemed to care. 

Jim, with mind racing and far away from there, concluded that reality was about to melt down and there was nothing to do besides waiting for the end to reach them in lazy waves. Absolutely nothing mattered anymore. 

“... thus your soul, ideas… they belong to the spiritual realm, as opposed to the material realm…”

Jim had told his therapist about the eyes. He’d first noticed them at the shuttle station in Iowa, the first crowd he’d encountered after Tarsus. She’d started to explain projection to him, but he didn’t care about what she had to say because  she had those same sad eyes as well. No statement of hers or of anyone else’s could ever be wholehearted because everything was hopeless.

She was wrong also because he didn’t know despair, he didn’t know this ugly, gut-wrenching feeling that had taken over the population while he was gone. He couldn’t even bring himself to feel pity because his brain was always too hazy-

 _“This numbness within you, Jim, it doesn’t mean you’re fine,” She would repeat, at least twice a week, “What happens when you’re wounded and the sedative wears off?”_  

 _Jim, for his part, couldn’t hear the tone of worry in her speech. To him, that would simply be a weekly monologue, amusing him due to her meaningless persistence in trying to make him believe that she_ _—_ _or anyone_ _—_ _cared._  

 _He’d always snort before saying:  “God, you’re tacky as fuck.”_  

Jim was fine, really. 

“...the soul soon to be reincarnated would drink from the river _Lethe_ \- of forgetfulness…”

He wanted to scream at Mrs. Larson.

Tell her that Plato didn’t know shit, he’s dead, everyone’s dead; nothing is eternal. Not souls, not ideas, specially not feelings. 

He thought the anger he had was the most powerful thing someone could ever possess — worth more than one soul because it was how he mourned over thousands of lost lives, and with that he had taken down Kodos and his whole regime by himself. At age thirteen.

 _So tell me_ , dear Mrs. Larson, how was that anger gone? how had it been taken away from him? No matter how many times he looked at those days, his rage would never come back. And then one day he would die, the worms would feast on his small body and it would be like he didn’t exist in the first place. Nothing lasted.

Only this numbness and death.

 

+++

 

“ _So ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.”_ Spock read out loud, moving his mouth onto Jim’s hair.

 _“Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half._ ”  

He felt a feather-like touching running from the base of his spine up to his neck. The hand stayed there. 

“Ancient Vulcan fiction?” Jim mumbled.

Every time Spock talked he felt his voice reverberate through his naked chest —his head pillowed on it — and that soothed him like nothing else could. He was in heaven.

“Plato.”

Jim became stiff, uncomfortably silent, which Spock noticed right away.

“James?” He squeezed his arms.

He felt as if he were thirteen again. He remembered his life turning into hell, going to school every day with a head so full of fucking nothing his grades started to drop miserably. He had hated philosophy class with a passion, but now he knows it was because Mrs. Larson could reach the corners his different therapists couldn’t, and she hadn’t even known that.

“When I was younger, well… after Tarsus… I’d spent a few months thinking I didn’t feel anything.” Jim started slowly, pausing here and there.“It was all there, but I guess I was too used to the pain or something. I thought everything and everyone I looked at were coated in pain, except the problem had been with my own eyes all along. Like the allegory of the cave, I couldn’t see past my own reality. I convinced myself the world was going to end.”

Jim paused again. 

“I was confused as fuck-- it wasn’t _the_ world, it was  _my_ world, Spock. Me. I was waiting for my own destruction, the end of what Jim Kirk back then was known as.” 

He raised his head, looking at the man embracing him. Younger Jim also thought his days of sweetness were over. He was right in some ways -they indeed were, for years. He grew up on auto pilot, managing to maintain his most physical urges but never stopping to really taste life. 

His only certainty had been that life was fragile — and irrecoverable. He didn’t know if the trauma made him the person he was today, but he still had the same beliefs, which… actually saved his and others’ lives countless times. No-win scenarios couldn’t be a choice. 

But now, looking at Spock under him, so soft and so giving, and seeing where he was at in life, he wondered. He could change all his ill conceived musings (maybe he already had) about how life truly worked. He was at a point where he had the luxury to do it—more than luxury, he _needed_ to do it, needed to be driven not by self protection but by the desire to live and to believe that the consequences of life was not an antagonist to happiness. That’s how he would progress.  

Spock, — now running his fingers through Jim’s hair — was his biggest example of eternity and he was dumbfounded at how he had never realized it before. 

Their love ran so deeply that even if their relationship were over for any reason, he’d remember them in life. And it wouldn’t matter when they finally drank from the Lethe river because this love had already been stretched immensely and marked this reality in every way possible. 

It was thrilling. 

Jim shook his head, kissed Spock’s chest and laid down again. 

“Please, continue reading.”

And he continued. They continued.

 

The End

**Author's Note:**

> my idea was to portray jim kirk almost completely brainwashed by his own inner turmoils and carrying that until his adulthood because he didn't really know any other way to live (until he did)  
> tysm for reading!


End file.
